In an ever-changing landscape having a clear plan, measurable goals, and a comprehensive strategy are imperative for a growing business.
Here at Carlson Integrated, we are in the midst of refreshing our strategy and goals, which is also one of the invaluable services we offer our clients. Many years ago, I had the privilege of being formally trained in strategic planning. This included an extensive immersion experience that covered every strategic topic under the sun and truly opened my eyes to see how vital it is for every business and organization. It is in essence the foundation businesses are built on and provides the building blocks to help a business/organization flourish. Utilizing this experience and combining it with Bekah’s extensive business strategy knowledge, industry insights, and planning expertise we help ourselves and our clients drill down on vision, mission, purpose, audience avatars (primary, secondary, and tertiary), the current state of the business, creation of measurable goals, future goal planning for growth, creation of execution timelines, and the formation of comprehensive strategies to meet each goal. This process helps yield a clear business plan and approach, goals that can actually be met, and the means and timeline to achieve them.
Step 1 – Business Strategy: Clear plans give your business clear messaging and a focused approach. This type of clarity helps our clients maximize their workforce and time to move toward the goals they want to reach. It reduces unproductive avenues that yield little to no return on investment, sharpens the approach to reach goals and covert leads, and creates a clear vision, mission, values, and audience avatars to pursue and disseminate. At CI we recently dug into our own business to adjust our communication goals, re-evaluate our avatars, and tweak our approach to ensure that we are offering our clients the best value add we can which is one of the missions at the core of our business.
Step 2 – Goals Planning: Measurable goals are essential to understanding the growth of your business. Almost all business activities have some sort of measurable goal to track progress. These goals begin with current baseline measurements to determine what is currently happening, the creation of future goals with measurable ways to track them, and then a progress timeline for how these goals and measurements should play out as growth occurs. At CI we revisit our goals monthly, quarterly, and yearly to determine progress, tweaks, and growth insights. We utilize these goals in our weekly tasks and team meetings to ensure we are all moving in the same direction, toward the same goals, and maximizing our efforts even though we are spread nationwide serving clients in a large span of industries.
Step 3 – Comprehensive Plan: Finally, our comprehensive planning process takes our clear focused approach and our goals and turns them into an execution timeline with actual tasks to reach our goals. Often it’s easy to have the vision, but hard to put effective legs to it. This is where a comprehensive strategy becomes the playbook for all you do, with weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly goals that each have achievable tasks to execute, we help our clients bring their business vision into reality. When goals are realistic and achievable; when an understanding of the cost of each goal is clear; and when the results are measurable the effects are seen in your business. Our comprehensive strategy process truly changes the face of how our clients do business and is one of the value adds we pride ourselves in being able to offer. It also allows us to see where we can support our clients from a marketing standpoint and create network connections to the people and businesses we know will help them meet their goals.
If while reading this you wanted to raise your hand and say yes, please, now is a great time to schedule a Business Strategy meeting followed by a Comprehensive Planning session to allow us to help you make and meet your business goals and grow your business in the year to come. We truly want to be more than a marketing company, we want to be a partner to each and every one of our clients, helping them succeed and celebrating them every step of the way.
